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Darin Bartholomew (MS ‘17) came to the MS in IT Auditing and Cyber Security program after getting his undergraduate degree in MIS at Temple. It was an easy decision because he had a high level of confidence in the curriculum. He put his undergrad degree to use working as a technical specialist at Temple while he went on to earn his master’s degree.

“As a Fox alum, I already knew the quality of education they provide,” says Bartholomew, now a project manager specializing in cyber security for the investment firm, Vanguard.

He pursued the grad program because he wanted a career change. “I had been working in a functional, IT support capacity, but I wanted to go into cyber security,” says Bartholomew. Every week it seemed another major news story broke about security breaches and hackers. As every aspect of life becomes more entwined with technology, and more and more sensitive personal data flows over the internet, the risks and consequences for businesses and individuals are increasing.

It’s a problem Bartholomew felt he could contribute to solving, with the right additional training and education. “I wanted something that felt like more than a job. In cyber security you’re protecting people’s assets, their data, and sometimes even their physical safety,” he explains, noting that hospitals and first responders can’t do their life-saving jobs in the event of a cyber-attack on the power grid. “Cybersecurity grows in importance every day,” he says.

The foundation of skills he built while in the program have helped him succeed at work. “We did many hands-on labs—it wasn’t learning technology through a book,” he says. He particularly recalls professor Wade Mackey’s ethical hacking class, which helped him learn to “think like the bad guys” and use those insights to prevent security breaches from occurring in the first place. “For me as a student that was eye-opening. It made me want to do what I do. Other professors similarly brought real-world experience into the classroom from industry across a wide range of sectors including, healthcare and government.

In his role at Vanguard, he’s achieved that goal of meaningful work. “Vanguard is all about doing what’s right for investors. I want to be part of something that has an impact, waking up every day and knowing I play a role in keeping our client’s assets safe. Vanguard’s mission aligns perfectly with what I wanted in my career,” he says.

It’s been another great year for Temple MIS. We are proud to have hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems (AIS) Student Chapter Leadership Conference. The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and the opportunity to bring it back to Philadelphia was exciting. In addition, three Temple AIS student teams placed in the Alexion Analytics Challenge track and our student chapter took home two awards.

I am also pleased to share our faculty’s recent research accomplishments. Professor Min-Seok Pang won best paper awards from the Association for Information Systems and Information Systems Research. Professor Detmar Straub’s had a busy year generating eight top journal articles on topics including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. We also profile Professor JaeHwuen Jung’s research about how mobile devices affect behavior.

Our signature event with the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), the 19th Annual Fox IT Awards, was a great success. The honorees were technology innovators and leaders Angela Heise of Leidos, John Collier of Wawa, and Himesh Bhise of Synacor. IBIT also launched the Digital Innovation Foundry, a hub for assessing, integrating, and prototyping digital technologies.

Read about our successful alumni, including Google Swarm Engineer Bryce Buffaloe, MIS ‘10, who is using data to tackle the opioid crisis. We also profile Clare Perretta and Anthony Pizzuto, graduates of the MS in Digital Innovation in Marketing, who are applying what they’ve learned to advance in their careers.

On April 11-13, Temple MIS hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference. Over 180 students and faculty attendees from 33 schools participated in the conference. AIS student chapter leaders and members convened in Philadelphia to exchange best practices, network with students from other chapters and engage with industry experts on cutting-edge topics. Chapter members also competed in four competition tracks in topics such as analytics, AI and blockchain.

Temple was the founding University for AIS student chapters,” says Jeremy Shafer, Temple AIS student chapter adviser. “The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and we were excited to bring it back to Temple for the 10th anniversary.”

The conference had a full agenda, with nine workshops and panels organized and led by students in topics such as chapter leadership, women in IT, location analytics and ethical hacking. Industry leaders from AmerisourceBergen, NBCUniversal, Alexion and Capgemini spoke to the student and faculty attendees about cutting-edge information technology topics. The conference also featured two keynotes: George Llado, chief information officer and senior vice president of Alexion, and Douglas Robinson, vice president of AmerisourceBergen.

“Bringing the conference back to Temple allowed us to show what we’ve accomplished as a chapter at a national level,” says Justin Kish, MIS ’19, Temple AIS chapter president. Temple AIS Officers Vice President Cara Evans, MIS ’19, and Director of Professional Development Ami Parekh, MIS ’19,  coordinated a team of over 50 student volunteers, who greeted and guided attendees around campus.

The members of Temple AIS truly showed their dedication to the organization,” says Parekh, “The enthusiasm of our student volunteers made the conference a memorable experience for everyone.”

Matthew Nelson, executive director of AIS and Matti Rossi, past president of AIS, attended the conference. Nelson was impressed with the quality of the conference. “The quality of the competitions, the professionalism of the students and the enthusiasm and networking between students and universities is at the heart of AIS’ mission.”

“The 10th AIS Student Leadership conference demonstrated once again the liveliness of our student chapters and the health of the information systems field. AIS is very grateful for the support of Temple and the Fox School of Business and Department of Management Information Systems for organizing this year’s event,” says Rossi.

Back in 2006, JaeHwuen Jung, assistant professor of Management Information Systems, had something in his back pocket few other people had access to at the time. As an IT application architect at the largest telecom company in South Korea, he had a smartphone with unlimited data.

Almost immediately, he saw the future. “I knew this was going to change the way people shopped, did business, and lived their lives.” It changed his behavior, says Jung. For example, he became a comparison shopper, checking out the items he wanted in a bricks-and-mortar store but making the purchase online, for the lowest price.

After almost seven years in that job, what he saw inspired him to earn a Ph.D. in MIS. Today, he researches the impact of new channels and digital platforms on consumer behavior.

Jung’s paper “Love Unshackled: Identifying the Effect of Mobile App Adoption in Online Dating,” published in MIS Quarterly in March 2019, explores the impact of one such channel—mobile apps—for those in search of romantic partners. His paper shows that accessing dating apps via mobile phone results in users not only increasing their access but also getting better matches than they would have using a desktop version alone.

Why? It all has to do with the way a mobile device affects behavior. “As we rarely share our mobile phone and use it in more private places such as bathroom, it feels more private than a computer,” says Jung. So when people use a dating app on their phones, they are honest, more impulsive, and less inhibited. All these things add up to more time spent using the app and better matches.

Jung’s new research looks at how to optimize the referral program. He’s testing different referral incentive designs and learning surprising things. “If the company rewards the existing customer, there’s some guilt involved because they get something and the friend they are referring doesn’t,” he explains. But if the friend benefits, people are willing to make more referrals, and to closer friends.

In the classroom, Jung teaches data analytics to MIS majors and minors. He shows how businesses can efficiently store and retrieve data as well as how to analyze increasingly complex datasets. “Today, companies can track user locations. They know more about user behavior. With all this data comes marketing opportunities,” he says.

Clare Perretta, MS ’17, didn’t know what she wanted next in her career when she enrolled in the MS in Digital Innovation and Marketing program, but she had a hunch that the program would get her there. “I had been a writer and editor for years, but I was always drawn to marketing,” she recalls.

While she was a student, she worked full time as a communications specialist at NextGen Healthcare. Her colleagues in digital marketing turned her on to the magic of metrics, including Google Analytics. Making decisions based on data—not opinions—appealed to her, and she knew she needed more education to hone that expertise.

Professor Steven Sclarow’s Process Improvement class sparked a passion for project management. As part of that class, Perretta created a document that details every step a project goes through from idea to implementation at NextGen. After sharing it with a new NextGen vice president, the marketing department started using it as official reference material.

Another invaluable part of the program for Perretta was the network she joined. In fact, her social media instructor, Kimberly Jaindl, recently tapped Perretta to fill a new role of brand communications representative on her team at Lockheed Martin.

During the program, I learned what I want to be doing—more strategy and operations-level work—and now that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she says.

In his career before enrolling in the program, Anthony M. Pizzuto, MS ’18, had done a little bit of everything in the world of online marketing. “I worked with production teams, I’ve led creative teams, I’ve done coding and merchandising,” he says.

Pizzuto has served as the head of digital experience for Victoria’s Secret PINK brand, where he led the development of their app and oversaw user engagement. He’s also worked as the director of marketing for Prudential Financial.

What he learned in the program goes deeper than digital. “I learned to understand who the customer really is,” he says.

Since earning his degree, he has taken on a new role as head of brand marketing for Days Inn, owned by Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Now he applies the principles of user experience he learned at Temple on a larger scale, overseeing a global marketing strategy that is both online and offline, including legacy formats like billboards and radio.

“I understand now that guiding a customer through a journey is the same whether it’s in the physical world or the virtual world. And that divide is getting smaller every day,” he says.

“Technology changes every three months, but the principles I learned at Temple can always be extrapolated to the bigger picture.”

Professor Detmar Straub had eight articles published or accepted for publication over the 2018-2019 academic year. These papers cover a wide range of topics, including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. This research will appear in the top journals in the discipline, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

According to an annual analysis produced by the University of Arizona, Straub has a cumulative h-index of 70, designating him as one of the most productive and most cited researchers in the field of MIS. The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar.

A partial list of Straub’s recently published and forthcoming work is below:

• Lee, J., Park, Y., Koo, Y., & Straub, D. (in press). Holistic Archetypes of IT Outsourcing Strategy. MIS Quarterly.
• Jung, D., Kim, B.C., & Straub, D. (in press). Innovation and Policy Support for Digital Two-Sided Market Platforms: Can Government Policymakers and Executives Optimize Both Societal Value and Profits? Information Systems Research.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). Fostering Participant Health Knowledge and Attitudes: An Econometric Study of a Chronic Disease-Focused Online Health Community. Journal of Management Information Systems
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). An Analysis of the Evolving Intellectual Structure of Health Information Systems Research within the Information Systems (IS) Discipline. Journal of the Association of Information Systems.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (2019). Why do participants continue to contribute? Evaluation of usefulness voting and commenting motivational affordances within an online knowledge community. Decision Support Systems, 118, 21-32.